Speaker says agency's conflicting goals along river must be reconciled
Chico Enterprise Record- 3/15/02
By Heather Hacking, staff writer

The Sacramento River Conservation Area could help property owners jump through time-consuming regulatory hurdles, a Sacramento water attorney said Thursday in Chico.

But first the SRCA needs to reconcile two competing goals: creating a limited river meander zone while protecting "hard points" such as fish screens and bridges, she said.

Sandra Dunn was among the dozen presenters at the Sacramento Valley Water Awareness Workshop at the Masonic Family Center.

Dunn is a managing shareholder at the law firm Somach, Simmons and Dunn. She represented M'&'T Ranch when a gravel bar threatened to cut off a multi-million-dollar fish screen and water pumps at the ranch. The gravel bar also was clogging the city of Chico's outflow pipes at the sewer treatment plant along the river.

The problem at M'&'T was presented to the board of the Sacramento River Conservation Area, a nonprofit group set up to allow varying interests along the river to come to the same table and talk about competing concerns.

M'&'T manager Les Heringer wanted to act quickly so he wasn't left high and dry if the gravel bar continued to grow.

The SRCA stepped in and was able to get funding for a study of short-term and long-term solutions. Long-term solutions were too costly and time-consuming to do right away, so in November M'&'T and the city were allowed to dredge the gravel bar back to where it was in 1995 when the fish screens were installed.

M'&'T's manager was able to push through the red tape because of "relationships M'&'T had made" with the regulatory agencies over the years. Yet, Dunn said, someone unfamiliar with the process could have been delayed considerably.

Dunn was hired to help Heringer work with the 12 different agencies that needed to give approval for the dredging. (They are listed at the end of this story.)
The SRCA has been part of the problem, Dunn said, but also has the potential to be part of solutions in the future.

The SRCA was formed in 1986 with the goal to preserve and re-establish riparian habitat along the river. The program is voluntary and attempts to balance the needs of interests such as agriculture, the environment, public agencies and other interested folks.

The SRCA has done a good job of focusing attention of competing interests and bringing everyone to the same table, Dunn said.

However, they still need to figure out how to balance protection of fish screens and other projects within a meandering river zone.

Since the 1990s, enormous amounts of public money have been spent to install fish screens along the Sacramento River so threatened and endangered fish don't get trapped in irrigation canals.

Fish screens were promoted as a win-win. The screens helped the environment, and farmers could continue diverting water from the river without fear of being in violation of the Endangered Species Act, Dunn said.

Yet, advocates of river meander argue the natural process of erosion and sedimentation is needed to restore habitat for plants, wildlife and fish.
Dunn said the SRCA adopted wording to allow a limited meander zone. She said many agencies with authority along the river have adopted the SRCA river meander goals as "de facto regulations."

Those agencies are beginning to ask for more mitigation when projects such as M'&'T's dredging of the gravel bar are done.

At one point M'&'T was asked to make up for disrupting the river based upon what the land would have been like when riparian habitat had built up 20 years in the future, Dunn said.
But the ranch negotiated a different project that put land aside for someone to establish habitat on five acres on the M'&'T ranch, Dunn said.

She said the state and federal agencies need to figure out how they are going to deal with hard points and the river meander before they continue to spend millions more on fish screens.
The SRCA is a logical forum for debating this, she said. At this point, she doesn't think regulators know enough about the natural process of the river to reconcile the competing issues.

Dunn said there are a lot of ways the SRCA can play a stronger role for property owners. First would be to set up a single permitting process - specifically one form - that regulatory agencies would accept. This would save property owners an enormous amount of time, she said.

The SRCA could also work toward guidelines the agencies could use for mitigating projects within the meander zone.

Another problem for projects is finding land that is an appropriate substitute for disrupting the natural meander. When Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District added hard points to protect its fish screen, the district had to search to buy "erodable land" along the river. But Dunn said by the time they found such land, some of it had already been washed away.

She said the SRCA could help by pinpointing land that would be appropriate replacement for dredging and riprap projects.

A long-term solution for M'&'T is still in the works, but it will likely be a long, difficult process, she said.

Dunn said the agencies requiring approval for the gravel bar dredging included: the state Department of Fish and Game, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Army Corps of Engineers, National Marine Fisheries Service, Regional Water Quality Control Board, Environmental Protection Agency, State Reclamation Board, California State Lands Commission, State Parks and Recreation Department, California State Department of Conservation, State Historic Preservation Office and Butte County.

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